This invention pertains to telephone switching systems in general.
Business communication has taken two separate paths. One involves telephone conversations and the other involving computer communication.
Until now, business telephone communications have been based upon the approach that each individual controls his own call traffic through multiple buttons on proprietary telephone instruments and/or simple commands entered through "hookflash" or the telephone keypad. Further, the architecture and philosophy applied to business PBXs or other telephone switches is limited to the "switching" of calls, such as incoming calls, to internal stations or internal stations to internal stations. This approach strictly avoids operation based upon "call content" such as the type of call, from whom it originates, etc. The limited capabilities of the multi-button telephone instruments and the lack of awareness of call content severely restrict the capabilities and features available and thus reduce the overall effectiveness of the business telephone systems of the past.
The focus of computer technology has become the desktop workstation computer attached to one or more business enterprise-wide, high-speed digital networks which interconnect the workstation computers of business enterprise's employees with a variety of information servers, communications and computing devices. The business enterprise's digital network may be a combination of Local Area Networks LANs and Wide Area Networks WANs attached together via a variety of transmission media augmented by the Internet. These corporate communications worlds, i.e., business enterprise's digital networks and the public switched telephone network PSTN remain separate and distinct until now.